Twitter just rolled out their new “embeddable tweets” aka “Blackbird Pie” tool that allows you to basically quote a tweet inside your blog. No longer do you need to screenshot a tweet to make reference to it. Now you can just as easily embed it in your blog post.
what do you all think of twitter’s embeddable tweets? aka blackbird pie. http://j.mp/9qAM6q
Brian Breslin
brianbreslin
There are a few questions this brings up in my mind. 1. Is this a play to get even more contextually relevant links back to twitter? I’ll need an SEO expert to give me some knowledgeable feedback on this one. 2. Why is this duplicating content and not pulling an iframe w/the original (uneditable) content? 3. Isn’t grabbing the twitter user’s bg image completely uncompressed super inefficient? (in my case it adds 300k to the download/embed) 4. Isn’t this method open to fake tweets or FARTs (Fake A Re Tweet)?
I met @brianbreslin today. Coolest dude ever.
ashton kutcher
aplusk
– note the above tweet was modified by ME after using blackbird Pie – looks so authentic though, doesn’t it? 😉
What do you think about this?
also note what happens when you embed 2 tweets in one post. they take on the 2nd tweet’s styling/formatting (background)
Brian – I don't know about Twitter's motivation for showcasing the embed hack, but I like the ability to do it. There ARE some downsides, like the easy possibility for faking tweets, and inability to resize the tweet, but it's useful to me. Besides a post in which I've embedded your tweet asking about them, here's a post I wrote, called Janice Pays It Forward – And Teaches A Great Lesson, in which I've embedded two tweets: http://bit.ly/cOT7MN
So, yes, I think the ability to embed tweets this way is great. Definitely saves me time, lets me post to my blog faster, focus on the writing, and not get distracted with creating an image of a tweet.
Hey Brian, Not sure how much this will help Twitter from an SEO stand point, they will get a ton of additional deep links to pages on the site. But to what end. Is Twitter trying to rank better for “Brian Breslin”? It's the anchor text of the link as it ties to the topic of the landing page that counts.
The other standard link to Twitter from these will all have similar “less than a minute ago” type anchor text and will quickly be downgraded by the engines.
Now the two SEO benefits I see are not for Twitter. First if I made a Twitter client, I would now have a link to my homepage on every page that had an embedded tweet using my tool .. Great for me!
Second, If I was “Brian Breslin” I would embed my Tweets all over the place if I wanted my Twitter profile to rank well for my name. Especially if I had ORM issue .. 🙂
BTW .. when are you going to introduce me to Ashton. 🙂